Parents of the Year

I'm pretty sure Parents of  the Year is a award Ben and I will not be winning anytime soon. You see the Parents of the Year would always buckle their baby into the highchair no matter what. They would not throw him in the highchair and leave him unbuckled while he ate some cut up bananas, even if they were enjoying their dinner right beside him. Nope the Parents of the Year would not do that, but we would. This is a story about our first big parenting fail and the awfulness that followed.

It was like any other Monday night supper, Drake was in his highchair(unbuckled) Ben was sitting right beside him and I was beside Ben. After slaving away for hours minutes making my gourmet meal of Hamburger Helper (admit it, you love it just as much as I do) we just sat down to enjoy our supper when Ben noticed we were out of napkins. He got up and walked the 5 steps to the paper towel holder to grab a makeshift napkin. As he is doing that I'm in my own little world eating my supper when all the sudden I hear Skinner run away and Drake land on the ground with a giant THUMP. All is silent while Ben and I look around to see what the commotion is and I notice Drake is not in his highchair. At the exact moment I jump out of my chair and run to scoop him up he starts screaming. My heart broke into a million tiny pieces as I tried to comfort my poor baby. He screamed for about 4 minutes an awful scream...the kind of scream where he could not catch his breath.

Sidenote: Since neither Ben or I actually saw it happen we are not for sure exactly how he fell out, but from what we can piece together we think that Drake was leaning out of the side of his highchair to try and pet Skinner when he leaned too far and tumbled out. We also think that he actually landed on top of Skinner which scared Skinner and made him take off and Drake landed on the  floor. Poor Skinner unknowingly took one for the team!

 Ben and I wanted to get him calmed down so we decided to give him a bath, his very favorite activity. As soon as we started to undress him he calmed down. We had him crawl to his bath like we do every night so we could see if he was in any pain when he crawled. As I gave Drake a bath, Ben called Dr. Papa(my dad) for advice. He told us the warning signs of concussions and said we should check on him several times during then night to make sure he did not throw up. Most of all Dr. Papa reassured us that this kind of stuff happens all the time and kids are built to withstand it. Drake was his old self as soon as he hit the tub and showed no signs of any injury the rest of the night or the following days.

Ben put Drake to bed that night and I sat on the couch and cried for the horrible guilt I felt for such a careless accident to happen to our son. I'm very conscious of all things safety related when it comes to Drake and felt so awful that we had thought that he would be OK not buckled in his chair since he was right beside us.  I know part of being a parent is making mistakes and even though this was our first major parenting mistake it will not be our last. I also know that we learned an important lesson and we will never make the same mistake again!

Oh yeah, I also know we will not be winning any parenting awards anytime soon, and I'm OK with that because we are learning as we go and that is what parenting is all about, right?

What is the worst parenting mistake you have made?